


rootbound

by triggernometry



Category: Flight Rising
Genre: Blood and Injury, Body Horror, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-04
Updated: 2019-07-14
Packaged: 2019-11-08 20:52:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17988335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/triggernometry/pseuds/triggernometry
Summary: Marulk wakes up in Leechroot Landing and discovers he's not the dragon he used to be.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Gonna try for a chapter-by-chapter story this time, rather than One Big Lump of Story like I usually do. My dragons are always furries unless otherwise noted.

The faint splash of water and the clammy press of mud against his cheek wake him, bring him back slowly from a vague, limitless-feeling blackness that grows fuzzier and more indistinct the more he tries to cling to it.

[He](http://flightrising.com/main.php?p=lair&id=2226&tab=dragon&did=33284172) opens the one eye not currently pressed to the wet earth. The view is hazy green and brown with a single dark line swallowing up the bottom of his vision. He blinks, tries to dispel the peculiar feeling of having a sticky film laid across his eyeball, obscuring his vision. It works, somewhat.

The dark line at the bottom of his vision resolves itself into the ground – dark mud if the feel of the earth under his face is anything to go by. Rising up from the mud are trees, dark reddish-green at their highest points and deep brown at their lowest. True trees by the look of it, not those mushroom-capped knockoffs Plague dragons always refer to as _trees_ out in the Wasteland.

Where the hell is he?

There's a cluster of saplings rising out of the soil just ahead of his snout. One of them moves, rising up out of the mud with a soft sucking sound, revealing a pointed edge rather than roots at its tip. The question of where he is suddenly becomes less pressing, and he jerks clumsily in place, trying to pull away from the _whatever_ -that-is.

He feels one arm bent awkwardly under his chest, the fingers pinned between his palm and breastbone with the sharp angle of his wrist. He braces it awkwardly against the ground and pushes up.

There's some resistance from beneath his body, like the ground itself is holding on to him with greedy hands. He can feel a strange tugging, as if something's caught on his clothes and pulling – except the feeling is definitely coming from his skin. He gets his other hand under him and _shoves_ away from the ground with a grunt, getting himself to his knees. He sways in place, feeling the exertion of the movement wash over him in a wave. He looks up.

The saplings aren't saplings at all: they're legs. The creature standing within arm's reach is a wood-ear deer, only – not quite. It's not _exactly_ like the ones back home: it's more brown and rusty-red than green, and the usual white freckles of mushrooms have been replaced with luminescently purple shelf fungus studding its sides like gills. It regards him eyelessly from a face that's a smooth, sheer drop of woody-looking chitin terminating in a short beard of moss.

“Uh,” he manages. The movement of the sound up his middle and through his throat feels unexpectedly _wrong_ , and he looks down at himself. He stares for a while, unable to comprehend what he's seeing.

Where to begin: the barest glimpse of the white of his undershirt, stained now with two shades of brown (one of which is unmistakably blood)? The scattering of holes across his chest, each one trailing roots clumped with mud? The big, ugly, ragged cavern where his stomach used to be, where his guts _ought_ to be, but which are now –

He reaches inside the hollow of his abdomen, very slowly. His fingers curl reflexively around something fibrous and giving, and he pulls out a frond of luminescently purple fungus. He stares at it until the burn of the colour starts to hurt his eyes, and then he crushes it in his hand and screams.

The blighted-looking wood-ear gives a scratchy bleat through its splintered mouth and turns, leaping from the muddy bank into a pool of greyish-green water behind it with a splash. Within seconds, the creature darts into the undergrowth and disappears wholly from sight. 

 


	2. Chapter 2

He doesn't know how long he just sits there, once the scream leaves him and the force of its passage drops him, hard, into a sitting position on the wet earth. He feels wet from the mud leach into the back of his pants and does not move for a good while. The swamp – for it is a swamp, he realises now, with both eyes open and staring – is quiet in the aftermath of his scream. The still air around him is anticipatory, but the roil of emotion in his chest clouds his other senses, makes it difficult to care about the curious anxiety of the quiet in the swamp. He tries to get a handle on what he's feeling and realises vaguely that he is not breathing.

He takes a deep breath, feels the air pass uselessly through the holes in his chest, venting clumps of soil and roots that patter softly down his front. He reaches up blindly, patting what remains of his shirt, and feels the unevenness of his skin underneath. He tugs at the collar and angles his head to look down at himself: under his shirt, the natural red of his skin is obscured by dark, dense leaves.

Somewhere, a bird gives a tentative chirp. Then another. Slowly, like a poorly-kept phonograph starting up, the noise comes back into the swamp around him.

He tries to remember anything from before he woke up, but trying to force his thoughts to coalesce into something solid only produces a dull, aching throb somewhere deep in his skull. A few scattered, half-formed impressions flit across the back of his eyes: the sound of Wastebred hooves clomping on the packed dust of the Wound Road threading through a place the locals called the Mother's Teeth; an amber-greenish line on the horizon; the feel of someone else's hand in his, soft and warm.

The throb turns to a steady pounding, making dark spots flicker at the edges of his vision, and he leaves off the attempt to remember anything of substance in favour of staying conscious.

“Get up,” he says, out loud, in a voice that feels like it oozes out of him. Reluctantly, he follows his instructions, getting to his feet with no small amount of effort. He stands, swaying on his feet, feeling an impossible _weight_ bearing down on him from somewhere in his heart – if it's still in there, anyway.

He swallows down the urge to pass out or vomit – he's not sure which, or maybe it's both – and turns in a slow circle to try and get his bearings. Back home in the Labyrinth, navigating the forest wasn't too hard, if you knew what to look for. He's never been through Plague swampland, though; whatever tried-and-true methods for getting un-lost in the Wilds probably won't serve him too well here.

He decides, then, to just pick a direction and see where it takes him. He heads in the opposite direction of where the blighted wood-ear ran, where the patch of earth he'd been lying on continues a while in a snaking, humped-back little island formation threading through two large pools of greenish-grey still water.

The swamp around him is back to its full array of sounds now: the thrum of insects, the twittering of birds, the chittering of things he can't readily put a name to. The undergrowth of the swamp is not as thick on the little mud-bar he's walking on, though it's truly dense everywhere else he turns an eye to. The mud is hard packed here, like he's not the first to put his boots on it; staring closely, he can see the impressions of other tracks come before his. Some of them look dragon enough. Most don't.

Everywhere he looks, trees are studded with more of that luminous purple fungus, sticking out sharply against the rusted green of the foliage. It reminds him of home, if home had been halfheartedly described to and then rendered by someone with a truly ghastly sense of colour and hue.

“Plague's so god damn ugly,” he mutters to himself. The rumble of his voice stirs up the foliage in his chest and makes him cough. Something catches in his throat and he thumps his chest with a fist to clear it.

Whatever comes loose and flies out of his mouth, it skitters away into the underbrush quicker than he can get a good look at it. He tries not to think about the implications of that too hard and keeps moving.

The mud-bar eventually peters off into a body of water that's a good sight larger than any of the others he's seen so far and, staring around in all directions, he finds it difficult to immediately pick out the edges of the pool. Fortunately, there's a spine of steps – bits of wood and scrap, by the looks of it, which he can't readily see the attachment points for – leading out from the bank and snaking off out of sight through a corridor of water and bramble.

He sticks a foot out tentatively and taps the toe of his boot on the foothold floating in the water. It doesn't sink, doesn't really even move under his weight. He's not fool enough to think that that means the water here's shallow.

He follows the footholds out into the water, first cautiously, then with growing confidence as he fails either to fall off or sink into the water. There's little to occupy his eyes with on either side of him, so he just keeps his gaze locked on one foothold at a time to make sure he doesn't slip or miss a step.

That's probably why it takes him longer than it ought to realise he's being watched. The feeling drapes over his skin like lengths of spider web, invisible until one blunders right through them on a wooded path. He gets both feet planted firmly on a foothold and looks up.

He doesn't have to look far. Dead ahead, the footholds give way to mud again and the underbrush opens up in a peculiarly curated-looking way, and right smack-dab in the open patch between the clumped-up bramble is a blighted-looking wood-ear deer.

_That_ blighted-looking wood-ear deer, he's pretty sure. He has no way of properly identifying the thing, there's just something about the way it looks at him that speaks to a sense of  _Hello again_ rather than  _Howdy stranger._

“You fine 'im?”

The voice is a raggedy bit of bone on a string of twine, sharp where it bounces off the solid parts of the swamp and dull where it scrapes over the leaves of the underbrush and over his ears. His eyes dart from one side of the bramble corridor to the other, trying to put a face to voice, but sees nothing.

Or, well, not exactly nothing: to the left of the wood-ear, the underbrush shifts and then – _something_ – peers out at him with ruby-coloured eyes tucked in tight behind a curtain of tangled hair, swamp debris, and scaly skin.

Somewhere in the mess of scale and debris there's a gleam of teeth, long and curving, as the something opens its mouth and speaks in that ragged-bone voice again, drawling and unhurried:

“You'n a _real_ fix, mister."

 


	3. Chapter 3

He lets the stranger's words hang in the air a moment. No response that isn't patently passive-aggressive comes immediately to his mind, so he just keeps his tongue still in his head. His hand twitches of its own accord, brushing up against his side – but he already knows his holster's long-gone even before his fingers close around empty air.

The ruby-eyed stranger dislodges themself from the brush and comes out to stand beside the wood-ear. He can't quite make sense of them even with their body fully out in the open: there's something of a tundra to their form, hunched and nominally upright though it is, with massive paws terminating in hooked black claws unlike anything he's ever seen a tundra wield before. Their fur is the same deep brown as the mud they stand on, patched over with dusty green scales that grow in an irregular, scattershot pattern all over whatever hide he can make out.

The not-quite-tundra gives him a grin, and the double rows of tusks hanging out from their too-wide mouth give a dull gleam in the sickly light coming down through the canopy above.

"Help you?" he says.

The stranger throws their head back and gives a comically loud  _haw!_ of laughter, not unlike the unholy union of a gunshot married to a dying stormseeker. 

"Naw," the stranger says after they collect themself. "I s'pose I might coulda help you, though."

"Only if you know the quickest way to get out of here."

The stranger puts a large, scaly paw to their chest and gives him another long, slow smile. Somewhere in the tangle of mane spilling over their head, neck, and shoulders, two ears too thin and pointed to be a tundra's ears wiggle comically in opposite directions, and he places the parts of the stranger that don't fit all at once.

He's talking to a god damned _podid._

"I know all the ins an' outs'a Leechroot, so-hap," the stranger says. "I show you the outs, you gon' keep gone?"

"You got my word on that."

The half-podid thing gives him another too-wide smile and makes a show of stepping aside with one arm outstretched in a _right-this-way,-sir_ gesture indicating the path through the bramble corridor behind them. The blighted wood-ear makes a sound like dry seed pods rattling -- a snort, maybe, assuming the thing breathes at all -- and darts away into the underbrush, leaving the two of them alone and the path through the swamp ahead wholly unobstructed.

He finishes the rest of the stepping-stones through the water and sets his boots down heavy on the bank, coming closer to the half-podid thing than he's entirely comfortable with. They smell like old, wet wood and the turn of fresh, hungry soil under a spade.

"Milfay," the stranger says. She produces a paw from the depths of her overabundant mane and holds it out to him in a gesture that seems comically elegant compared to the rest of her brutish exterior.

He pauses a minute, considering Milfay's paw. He's not adverse to touching it -- it's just his own name doesn't come readily to mind and, for a moment, he has no idea what he's going to say if and when he accepts the proffered paw.

He stretches his own hand out and takes Milfay's paw. It's warm and surprisingly dry against his palm. Something tickles in the middle of the handshake; he looks down quick enough to see a centipede the colour of too-old porridge wriggle free of the joint of their thumbs and skitter away into Milfay's fur. Milfay seems unperturbed, so he decides not to comment on it. All things considered, the centipede doesn't even register on the scale of things he's seen since coming-to.

He tries to say his name, tries to just let it come out of him naturally. He's had to have said it before, a hundred times at least. He lets his jaw go soft and a low, guttural _mmmuh_ noise leaves him. He shakes his head, almost too baffled to feel embarrassed. Almost.

"Don't worry none," Milfay says, giving his hand a firm up-and-down shake that's steadier and more refined than he expects. "Swamp ain't took e'erything. Name comes when it comes. Sprout ain't know it gonna be a heartblood tree when it grow up, but it don't make no diff'rence to the sprout in the end."

He's not entirely sure how to take that advice, but he nods like he understands anyway.

Milfay gestures for him to follow and they start off down the muddy track through the brambles in single file. The foliage of the swamp grows closer and closer as they move, though the going doesn't get much more tougher. Something strange happens each time Milfay brings him close to what looks like impenetrable thicket: the tangles of undergrowth and brambles pull away, letting them pass unhindered.

He works up the courage to look behind them and -- sure enough, manages to catch the brush settling behind them with a sigh like an old swing door sliding back into place.

"Make no habit of lookin' behind," Milfay says. To illustrate her point, she doesn't turn her head to look at him, though her voice carries back to him just fine all the same. "No point in seein' what's followin' if'n you ain't ready to know."

 


End file.
